The Three Rs

This is the three “R”s… Repetition, repetition, repetition
– Mark E Smith

This weekend Tate Modern hosts a season of ‘classic’ artists’ films with ICO Essentials an Independent Cinema Office touring programme. The six programme season (themes include ‘Dreams’, ‘Modernity’, ‘Play’, etc) consists mostly of historical avant-garde perennials with which most students of the form should be quite familiar, with the possible exception of The Otolith Group’s Protest programme on Sunday and one remarkable film in particular screening in Monday’s Pop programme curated by Tanya Leighton: Film Montage I an all too rarely screened film made in 1965 by Frankfurt artist Peter Roehr who died of cancer at the young age of 23 in 1968.



In his short life Roehr produced a prodigious amount of work incorporating a wide range of media including visual poetry (Typomontagen and Textmontagen), found objects (Objektmontagen), sound (Tonmontagen), photography (Fotomontagen) and of course Filmmontagen. He was concerned with serial accumulation and repetition, often using ‘found’ images and material, but whatever media he worked in he followed the same strict principles. To Roehr, the montages represent a kind of self-realisation, freeing him from aesthetic problems like form, composition, and artistic innovation.

I change material by repeating it unchanged. The message is the behaviour of the material in response to the frequency of its repetition. I assemble available things of the same kind together. These might, for example, be objects, photographs, freestanding forms such as letters, texts, tones and sounds, film material, etc., the results I call ‘montages'. – Peter Roehr

Roehr used material from popular and mass media, advertisements, quotidian objects and structures from urban architecture, familiar but often anonymous material which became abstracted and de-familiarised through repetition while nonetheless maintaining, sometimes intensifying the dynamics of its source. His films repeat short extracts of both carefully appropriated and specially filmed material which, while perhaps related to structuralism and serial music, partly anticipates more current practices, as Rudolf Frieling has observed:

It could be possible to call Roehr a forerunner of current sampling in music and in VJing, but unlike the current contemporary artists who conceive a potentially endless loop to ensure constant presence in the exhibition space, he insists on a specific dramaturgy with a beginning and an end. The whole thing had its inherent logic, its quasi mathematical aesthetics…

While his aesthetic processes might have much in common with Minimalism, Pop Art, Serialism, etc, Roehr’s work remains quite unique; as repetition determinedly and obsessively abstracts meaning there is something faintly absurd, a dry humour that distinguishes his work from the detached coolness typical of Minimalism while more concerned with structure than most Pop. No more is this evident than in his repetitive use of advertising jingles in his Tonmontagen such as Take a Look (click for mp3). Alas Roehr didn't live long enough to fulfill his ambition of showing all the film sequences simultaneously on a gigantic screen as a tribute to the film Lawrence of Arabia.